


*hacker voice* I'm In

by thenewbuzwuzz



Series: The Scrap Heap of Life [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Ancient Egyptian Deities, Gen, Hacking, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27138568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenewbuzwuzz/pseuds/thenewbuzwuzz
Summary: Another piece of the incomplete AU where Willow and Katrina Silber are robotics buddies. This fragment is about how Willow accidentally became a follower of Seshat the internet goddess and how she used her resulting powers of Hollywood Hacking.
Relationships: Willow Rosenberg & Katrina Silber
Series: The Scrap Heap of Life [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979762
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	*hacker voice* I'm In

**Author's Note:**

> This might stand alone best of all the fragments I've got for this AU, even if it does breeze over plot and plot holes alike and omit some of what I feel are the most important parts of the story. It was meant to be one of approximately 7 pieces (jeez, self) that would fit together to tell the story.  
> My wonderful beta thewiggins gave me some valuable feedback on the original, shorter and even less coherent version of the AU that I posted for Which Witch Ficathon in January, but I didn't let them look at the new draft, mainly because I'm taking advantage of the .2 seconds when I feel capable of posting and being rid of (some of) the thing.

Okay. Ready, Giles? So this is me explaining everything about Seshat for the Watcher diaries.

The first strange thing that Katrina and I noticed was that I seemed to be much better at tech when I was in Sunnydale than when I visited her in Dutton. Now, for a while I thought that must be because I was anxious around her, but that didn't explain it very well. It wasn't like I was that anxious all the time. And often, we'd hit a wall with the robot design and fail to think of anything in hours of brainstorming, but as soon as I got home, I'd figure out the solution without trying. Or Katrina could ask me something, and I'd know what to say while in Sunnydale, but later in Dutton I couldn't even understand what I had done. Then there was that time I tried to hack into Sunnydale's power grid from Dutton and found it wasn't even on the internet. Which really raised the question of how the heck I'd done it the first time. Or when we needed to prevent the Initiative from tracking Spike and we used your radio as a transmitter to fake GPS signals -- it isn't even built to transmit! Yet somehow it just worked.

It turned out the difference in my tech skills didn’t just depend on being in Sunnydale. I wore the glass cat pendant as a necklace one day, and that day I was a computer genius in Dutton too. Yes, this one. I call it a cat, but, as you see, it has spots like a leopard, and there’s this green seven-point star on the crown of its head. I think that's probably a papyrus leaf, but I didn't know it then.

Katrina found out it’s a talisman of Seshat. Yes. Right, of course you know about the goddess of libraries. Well, some technopagans think she's also a goddess of the internet these days. JavaScript libraries are libraries too, you know. Jenny must have been a follower, and we think Seshat accepted me as Jenny’s successor when I took the talisman. Which, by the way, I'm sure Jenny would want me to have, like she'd want you to have the rose quartz I also found in her desk that time.

I was all set to walk into the Initiative guns blazing and improvise, but Katrina insisted on figuring out what could go wrong and running some tests first. I agreed, because didn't want to risk arguing with her again just then -- sure, Giles, but it wouldn't _really_ have been risking my life, I mean, no offense, but I was enormously powerful with the talisman. I would have figured something out even if the situation changed. Okay, fine, we didn't know that the talisman would only work while the moon was above the horizon. I'll give you that. Yes, it was useful to find that out while we were still preparing and planning. But I don't see why everyone has to keep rubbing it in. Katrina brings it up _all the time_. I got the message, thinking ahead is of use.

You saw the ritual, right? We offered coffee to Seshat, because we'd read online that she likes it. And we had the potted papyrus... The invocation we used goes, "Seshat the Scribe, Great Lady of the House of Books, soul of the internet -- you got all that? -- mistress of computers..."

...I'm sorry, I don't remember the rest. I could see if Katrina still has our full copy? She's the one who read it, so it probably stayed with her. Anyhow, the gist of it was we were asking for Seshat's blessing, arguing that the Initiative were using knowledge and technology for evil and we wanted to set things right. And then we offered her the coffee. I remember the exact wording from the start of the ritual, but I was very distracted when the spell started working.

I could see electrical signals shooting up and down the papyrus reed. I touched the plant, and I was connected to everything that lives, like a, well, a worldwide web. And Seshat's web, the internet, I felt that too, overlaying the web of neural networks. So to speak.

I saw what I looked like to you guys, when I focused on it. I was wearing a whole leopard skin, claws, tail, and all, over my jeans and pink cat shirt. The leopard's head was hanging over my chest - I looked down, and it was there all snarly. You know I don't like leather. But I knew Seshat is often depicted wearing a leopard skin, so this was a very good sign of her blessing. She was letting me do her will.

So, I arrived outside Lowell House and hacked one of the cypress trees outside the door.

Not hacked at it, I didn't bring an axe or anything. Hacked it. I think I could control anything as long as there were electrical signals in it, and as you know, electrical signals do run through the cells of trees. The mauve flowers happened because I read the genetic code from a passion fruit and planted it in the cypress. Mmm? Paraguay, I think. And then I made the cypress roots tunnel through the wall of the basement and push the earth aside to let me in. Reading the files of the Initiative to find Room 314 was a piece of cake after that.

Adam. I switched him off and disassembled him. His power core is nuclear, right, we knew that. Uranium-235. I gained access to his system by looking into his eyes, and I examined the power core. It was in this isolating little box made of a zirconium alloy. I closed my eyes and read the electron configuration of the zirconium. I mentally hit enter and wrote in a new electron shell. Which shouldn't have worked on a whole bunch of levels, and yet. The zirconium was now another element, something they use in nuclear reactors to slow the reaction down. It was all around the power core, so it shut Adam down pretty quickly. Like flipping a switch.

Adam is incredibly interesting. I made some drawings from memory afterwards, here. The way his demon and mechanical parts connect... is, of course, wrong. So wrong and should never have happened.

You got all you need, right? Neat! You can keep the drawings -- I have copies at home. Strictly as keepsakes, of course.

**Author's Note:**

> No concrit this time, please. I've been fiddling with this AU since January, and I just want it to be over.  
> If you made it this far, have some mythology links! I used these for inspiration:  
> https://www.crystalinks.com/seshat.html  
> https://www.teenwitch.com/divine/kmt/seshat.html  
> I've lost track of where I read a ritual for invoking either Thoth or Seshat and the coffee thing. I only took general ideas from that, though; I hope my rendition doesn't bother any Kemetic Pagans.


End file.
